If you thought security breaches were a scary thing right now, wait for a few more years to pass; the cost of data breaches is actually expected to increase to $2.1 trillion by 2019. That’s almost four times more than the cost of breaches now. This increase, according to the latest projections from Juniper Research (News - Alert), can be attributed to how fast consumers’ lives and enterprise data and records are becoming digitized.
Not only that, but hacking is becoming a profession now and more sophisticated attackers and software to perform those attacks is emerging. As the cybercriminals learn ways to break into systems and create malware, they aren’t just going after a small gain—they have much bigger targets too—further compounding the threat.
While North American businesses are currently the most at risk—nearly 60 percent of the anticipated data breaches happening worldwide in 2015 are expected to occur in North America—cyber threats will start to become more spread out globally as other countries start to digitize and increase wealth.
The report also noted that ‘hacktivism’ is also going to continue. This is hacking with a politically or socially motivated purpose. And while there may be fewer attacks overall, there will be more successful ones.
The research, “The Future of Cybercrime & Security: Financial & Corporate Threats & Mitigation,” also noted that traditional computing devices seem to be the target for infection. There has however been a rapid increase in hacks happening on mobile devices and the IoT but, the report’s author James Moar noted that because these kinds of hacks are not as profitable yet, they are not posing as much danger.
“The kind of threats we will see on these devices will be either ransomware, with consumers’ devices locked down until they pay the hackers to use their devices, or as part of botnets, where processing power is harnessed as part of a more lucrative hack. With the absence of a direct payout from IoT hacks, there is little motive for criminals to develop the required tools,” Moar said.
Armed with these startling projections, businesses should be creating a plan now and working toward defense mechanisms against anticipated attacks.
For OTT providers, there is even an opportunity to further capitalize on their latest cloud-based offerings for personal storage and premium content access. The argument is that by getting consumers to use multiple products from the provider, they will be less likely to turn away from the brand if it means giving up other products and content they still want.